I have been told this by several people. I normally live in Indiana, but I spent some time in San Diego with my brother who goes to school there. The cost of living was about the same in Indiana vs. San Diego.
It seems there are 2 major things that are different for COL. Housing and transportation. However if you are young and single, and share an apartment it isn’t so bad.
My half of the rent in Indiana was $250-300 when I had a roommate. When I shared a place with my brother it was $450 (since it was $900 for a 2 bedroom, which isn’t impossible to get in SD). The bus was more expensive at $80, but not by much.
If I had a family and wanted to live in a 2500 sq ft home in a good neighborhood, then the COL would be totally different in the 2 areas. But it seems if you are single its really not a huge jump from a small town in the midwest to an expensive area of the country. My rent and transportation was $200/month higher, but that was about it.
My son went from a small college town in Missouri to Chicago.
In college he lived in a large house with five roommates. In Chicago his share of the rent for a one bedroom apartment is more than the entire house rent in Missouri.
He didn’t drive in either place. In Missouri the entire town was within walking distance. In Chicago a monthly pass for the CTA is $86.
In college, ten bucks would buy him pretty much the best restaurant meal in town. In Chicago, ten bucks gets him a couple of beers or a ticket to the movies.
City and state sales taxes in Chicago are about 9%. In Missouri they were 6%.
According to thisa Big Mac costs nearly a dollar more in Chicago than it does in Bloomington, Indiana.
In Missouri a coin operated dryer in a laundromat gave 8 minutes for a quater. In Chicago it’s 6 minutes. It takes about 40 minutes for him to dry a load of laundry, which works out to 50 cents more per load.
NYC? I can’t imagine where that neighborhood might be.
My East Village studio ran for about $1800 a month in 2001. That year I happened to be visiting a friend and his wife in South Bend, Indiana. They nearly crapped themselves when they found out that my 400 sq ft room cost more than the mortgage on their 3 bedroom house on a lake.
And as kunilou alluded to, there is huge disparity in lifestyle costs. A college buddy of mine pointed out that $300 lasted an entire semester. In NYC can be a night out. OTOH, there are a lot of places in the Village that do have $2 beer specials.
Well, yeah, you lived in the East Village, which isn’t exactly the most… affordable of neighborhoods. Outer boroughs, you could do it easily. For Manhattan, Craigslist gives listings for reasonable looking $900 studios in Inwood/Hudson Heights/Washington Heights/Harlem, and really really tiny ones on the Upper West Side. It’s eminently doable.
The cost difference isn’t too bad. It costs me more to live in New York but I earn more money living here than I ever would have if I had stayed in Texas. When I left Dallas to come here I took almost the exact same job here as I had in Texas and it paid $13,000 a year more than I had been earning two weeks prior. There is no way I could earn the kind of money I do in NYC in most places around the country. Add to that my monthly transportation expenses dropped significantly when I no longer needed a car and that about makes it even.
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[li]Bloomington, IN[/li][li]San Diego, CA[/li][li]$50,000 annual salary[/li][/ul] Results
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[li]A salary of $50,000 in Bloomington, Indiana should increase to $83,860 in San Diego, California[/li][li]San Diego is 68% more expensive than Bloomington[/li][li]Housing is the biggest factor in the cost of living difference[/li][li]Housing is 245% more expensive in San Diego[/li][/ul] Just for grins …
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[li]A salary of $50,000 in Bloomington, Indiana should increase to $93,986 in New York, New York[/li][li]A salary of $50,000 in Bloomington, Indiana should increase to $94,794 in Washington, District of Columbia[/li][li]A salary of $50,000 in Bloomington, Indiana should increase to $59,919 in Denver, Colorado[/li][li]A salary of $50,000 in Bloomington, Indiana should increase to $51,726 in New Orleans, Louisiana[/li][/ul]
Just to clarify something. That is what you would need to make to have the same standard of living. It does not mean you would automatically receive a bump in pay by moving.
True. You could always live in someplace like Long Island City Queens or Jersey City, NJ. It’s a lot cheaper and still very close to Manhattan.
I do agree that COL are misleading for a single person. If you’re single then generally your big expense is your rent, and usually there is one easy way to lower your rent: downsize! And IME that’s what happens to most people who move to NYC – if you had a 1BR back home then you get a roommate in New York, or give up amenities and deal with a long commute. Most single people who move to NYC want to be there, so they are willing to give up something in their living situation.
I’ve moved from Chicago to NY and back and my monthly expenses were always pretty steady, it’s just that my lifestyle changed. There seemed to be an approximate dollar amount that I was willing to spend a month, and I could always find an apartment and lifestyle that kept me in that window.
Five years ago, I went from paying $1000/month for an ~400 sq. ft. apartment in the Bay Area, to $650/month for a 650 sq. ft. apartment in the Portland area. Gas is much cheaper up here, and auto registration is a fraction of what I used to pay in California. But other than those, I’d say everything else is about the same.
Yeah. That’d be a big change to most people. The question’s been answered - yes, the cost of living really is higher for single people: here’s an example in the OP.
It’s true though that the really big costs come in when you want to buy a place, or want to stop sharing with others (except your partner or your kids if you have any), and they don’t affect young single (which I presume = childless here) people nearly as much. You can often find ways to work around things and cut the costs a lot - once you’ve lived in a place a while, you know the cheaper places to buy food, you know the cheap but good bars, etc. But still, on average, the cost of living is higher for young single people too, yes.
Given that places which have a high cost of living tend to be city centres, which tend to have more young, childless people than suburban or rural places, it’d be a bit surprising if the higher COL didn’t include higher costs for young, single people.
I’ve always wondered about the cost of utilities though. I live in San Diego now and the number of days we have to put on either the heat or air conditioner is virtually zero. We don’t get snow, and there are only a single number of days a year where it drops below 45 or above 95. I imagine in Indiana, you have much bigger extremes in weather requiring things like heating oil and who-knows-what-else. On the downside though, we pay through the nose for water, which may even everything out…
How much do you pay for water? I’m just curious because I can’t imagine it coming anywhere close to balancing out but I’ve never considered how much water would cost in a dryer area. It’s so cheap it’s almost inconsequential here whereas a single family home can cost $500/month in heating oil.
Living expenses are certainly higher inside the Beltway than in my home state of New Hampshire. I pay a thousand dollars a month for rent, plus electricity (other utilities are included). That gets me a decent, but small, one-bedroom apartment in Arlington. The same rent would get me a pretty large one or two-bedroom apartment almost anywhere in the Granite State. For that matter, I could rent a small house in a good neighborhood in my home town for that kind of money.
But - I’d be in New Hampshire. Concord can be fun, Portsmith even more so - but at the end of the day, there just isn’t a “there” there. Being able to hop on Metro and go places, being in spitting distance of the Hill -
The expenses are higher. You adjust by consuming less. If you were willing to share a small apartment in rural Indiana, you could probably live for virtually free. You could even “make money on your rent” by living with an elderly person who had extra space and wanted someone else around to help with some chores.
If you go to an expensive restaurant and adjust by ordering the chicken instead of the surf & turf you would have gotten at the local family chain, the “dining expenses” at the expensive restaurant are still higher.
I think the point the OP is getting at is that it is easier to adjust your consumption when you are young and single, and I agree with that.
I am in San Diego. I have a small house ~1700 square feet with a small lawn and back slope which are watered. Gas and electricity are about $120 a month. Water is around $90 a month. Gas and electricity goes down to about $100 in the spring summer and fall because the heater is not on in the mornings.
True. And some expenses can actually be lower living in a city: less need for a car, or at least less need to run one all the time; more local supermarkets so you don’t necessarily need big kitchen cupboards; probably less distance to travel to work; more social outlets within walking or cheap taxi distannce so you don’t have to pay tons to get home after a night out, etc etc. Those only count for high COL places that are city centres, but most of them are.
All the same, even factoring everything in, downsizing, economizing, some lower costs, etc, it’s still more expensive even for a young single person to live in a high COL area.
